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  • “We unman ourselves”: Colonial and Mohegan Manhood in the Writings of Samson Occom
  • Peter L. Bayers (bio)

Toward the end of “A Sermon, Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian” (1772), Samson Occom remarks that “We unman ourselves” (192). This statement reveals what was a central concern for Occom as he traversed Anglo and Algonquian cultures: the shaping of his manhood, a dynamic that scholarship has yet to address. Raised with the Mohegan tribe, Occom formally entered into colonial culture at the age of nineteen and was met with the demands of colonial gender expectations. Occom often strategically shaped his rhetoric to meet colonial expectations of manhood as he negotiated the demands of the dominant culture for his practical purposes. Although Occom ably inhabited the discursive space of colonial manhood, he did not abandon the Algonquian masculine norms that were established by his Mohegan upbringing. At times Occom’s use of colonial discourse was adaptive: he claimed colonial masculine discourse to serve a distinctly Mohegan end. But more often than not, Occom’s writings make it clear that he shaped his manhood within established cultural norms of Mohegan masculinity, particularly as a male of considerable status within his tribe and the wider Algonquian community.1

The arrival of Europeans in the seventeenth century had a profound effect on traditional Algonquian male roles. Prior to this time, men were primarily responsible for hunting and fishing, manufacturing tools, and engaging in trade, diplomacy, and warfare.2 After the conquest of the Southern Algonquian peoples—at the end of King Philip’s War in Southern New England in 1676, what Colin G. Calloway calls a “watershed” moment (“Surviving” 2)—the traditional ways of life of the respective tribes were shattered as “[t]hey were confined on tiny reservations, subjected to increasing state regulation, and saw their lands whittled away” (4).3 As a result, the ability of the Southern [End Page 173] Algonquian men to sustain their traditional subsistence patterns became difficult. David J. Silverman writes:

English land purchases had so effectively restricted Indian movement that the natives’ mixed subsistence base of corn-bean-squash agriculture, fishing, shellfish gathering, and hunting had been seriously compromised. Fences crisscrossing the landscape were boundaries not to be breached. Dams prevented fish from migrating along streams and rivers. As deer herds declined, Indians were forced to slaughter their livestock or buy meat, even during the prime hunting season of late fall and winter.

(“Impact” 626)

With many Native men no longer practicing hunting, they took on the role of farmers, displacing women from one of their traditional gender roles. In general, Native men did not adjust to this new role. As Jean M. O’Brien explains, “[m]ost Indian landowners lost what they had over time, and the tendency for Indian men to enter service in two areas (military service and the emerging whaling industry) contributed to a grossly distorted sort of transiency,” leading to the absence of males from their communities for extended periods of time (153).

The disruption of traditional subsistence practices meant Natives had to rely increasingly on English goods—clothing, food, wares—to sustain themselves. Anglo-Americans took advantage of these needs, encouraging Natives to run up debt and putting them in a perpetual state of economic dependence. Debts were often so exorbitant that Natives could not pay them off; as a result, Natives were taken to court, where they were often ordered to repay their debt by performing labor for whites. If Natives wanted to avoid performing labor, they had their children indentured to pay off the debt. As a result, “[a]s early as 1716, Cotton Mather observed that Indian children ‘are now generally in English families’” (Silverman, “Impact” 643):

[O]ver the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries nearly all Indians in southern New England were affected in some way by indentured servitude. Bonded service gave Englishmen tremendous influence over the socialization of young [male] Indians and, subsequently, their conduct as adults—a situation with dramatic implications for Indian cultural patterns. Indentured service, in other words, was one of the most significant legacies of the English colonization of southern New England’s Indians.

(623–24)

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